Gavin Hood Will Direct His ENDER’S GAME Script; Summit Acquires Rights to Film

Gavin Hood (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) will direct his script for a live-action adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game for Summit Entertainment. Deadline reports that the studio has acquired U.S. rights to the film which is expected to go into production by early next year. We reported that Hood was rewriting a script by Card back in September of last year. Later, we learned that Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman were acting as producers on the adaptation, a fact that no doubt helped the film land financing from Summit. With the cash cow that is The Twilight Saga soon ending for the studio, it’s believed that Summit is hoping Ender’s Game will compete for coveted teen box office dollars against Lionsgate’s similarly targeted sci-fi adaptation, The Hunger Games.

Briefly, Card’s 1985 novel was based on a short story published in 1977 and is set in a future Earth that is reeling from two alien invasions. In preparation for a third, an international fleet begins training gifted youngsters to become commanders in the battle – the most talented of which is the book’s adolescent protagonist, Ender Wiggin. For more on the project, hit the jump for a synopsis of Card’s Hugo Award-winning novel.

In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race’s next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn’t make the cut—young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.

Ender’s skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.

Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender’s two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.